Penn in the News

Faculty members at Vassar College generally agree that teaching five classes per year makes it hard to keep up with research and the one-on-one interaction that students expect. Many professors also worry that students are taking on too many courses at one time. So a new proposal to address the issue -- shrinking the teaching load to four classes per year while adding a new student supervisory component, and cutting the number of units students need to graduate -- has attracted significant faculty support.

Danielle Bassett of the School of Engineering and Applied Science is profiled for her work on dynamic network neuroscience.

Richard Berk of the School of Arts & Sciences is profiled for his criminology research.

Penn and Penn Medicine are included in a list of partners working with Green City.

Hundreds of people are expected to attend a campus vigil Monday for Nicolas Leslie, a 20-year-old student at the University of California at Berkeley, who was killed in the terrorist attack on Nice, France, last week. Leslie was one of 84 people who died when a man drove a truck into a crowd of people in the French Riviera who had been watching fireworks. The man then opened fire on the crowd. Another 200 people were injured, including three Berkeley students.

The number of Saudi Arabian students enrolled at American universities has skyrocketed since the launch of a massive Saudi government scholarship program in 2005, increasing more than 17-fold. But after more than a decade of growth, many universities with sizable Saudi populations are anticipating significant declines in new Saudi enrollments as the government has retooled the scholarship program. Steep drops in enrollments at the English language level, the initial landing point for most Saudi students coming to U.S. universities, signal further declines ahead.

Vassar College economics student Ian Vasily cuts an unusual figure walking through campus in a hat bearing Donald Trump’s campaign slogan, “Make America Great Again.” Many students at the upstate New York school ask: “ ‘Are you actually supporting him?’ ” Mr. Vasily said, “ ‘Or is this ironic?’ ”At liberal-arts colleges in the Northeast and on many campuses nationwide, where left-wing activism often flourishes, there is little love lost between the presumptive Republican presidential nominee and student bodies.

Joseph Farrell of the School of Arts & Sciences comments on classics professors regarding themselves as language teachers.

When Paul Katz, a fourth-year graduate student at Columbia University, is researching primary texts in the library, he considers himself a student. But when he is grading undergraduate papers or lecturing to students, he sees himself as an employee who should have the right to join a union. The National Labor Relations Board is expected to decide on his status this summer in a ruling that could pave the way for graduate students at private schools across the country to unionize.

The Chronicle's executive-compensation package includes data on more than 1,200 chief executives at nearly 600 private colleges from 2008-13 and 250 public universities and systems from 2010-15. Updated in July, 2016, with 2014-15 public college data.